Empowered Patient Podcast Scanner Detects Pressure Injuries Before Visual Symptoms with Martin Burns Bruin Biometrics
Martin Burns, CEO of Bruin Biometrics, is focused on preventing pressure injuries, which are often not detected through visual and tactile assessments because damage starts invisibly under the skin. The Bruin scanner technology identifies pressure injuries by measuring sub-epidermal moisture, which can predict later tissue death, highlighting the condition that can be treated before it develops further. This handheld device is skin tone agnostic, addressing a significant health disparity and providing an objective number indicating the presence of excess fluid, allowing clinicians to act quickly.
Martin explains, "They are surprisingly common, and I emphasize surprisingly because pressure injuries are typically not talked about in the mainstream, but actually they affect about three to three and a half million patients a year in the US. And really shockingly, of those three to three and a half million, about 60,000 people die from them every year. So think about that as in the list of the top 10 leading causes of mortality in the United States, which is the surprising part. When you speak to friends and relatives, they've often heard of them potentially as bedsores, but nobody really has an appreciation of just how significant they are. How widespread or how deadly."
"The initial stages of it are imperceptible to any practitioner, but are actually measurable by objective technologies, and they don't become visibly manifest or physically manifest until much later. And what happens is they end up breaking the skin surface. As you can imagine, every time the skin is broken is an opening for infections and significant complications, which actually is the thing that ends up causing huge amounts of additional lengths of stay and costly treatments. And to the extent that those don't work, mortality."
"Thankfully, our scanner is one in which the mechanism it uses disregards skin tone entirely. In other words, skin color doesn't matter for the scanner. What we are measuring is an increase or a decrease in fluid at the specific site that we're measuring. And so it's skin tone agnostic, which is rather brilliant because dark skin tone patients die at a rate four times more than any other cohort, which is an absolute travesty and one in which it simply doesn't need to happen. And our scanner is a leading reason why it doesn't need to happen."
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